Sedate lady running 3-9 June 2019 #amrunning #running

Summary: A good week but I’m still tired and recovering from the marathon and it’s a bit hard to maintain training for big events and officiating at all-day events but that side of things will ease soon.

Monday – A lovely recovery run with Claire, chatting about our marathons, and my new yoga mat arrived! No pics.

3.2 miles / 12:04 mins per mile

Wednesday – Off to Abbey Stadium in Redditch with Hilary and Rob to be one of Sparkhill Harriers’ contributed officials for their veterans’ league match. A nice evening for it and Hilary, Darren and I plus helpers looked after the two javelin competitions. I was pulling through, which means being on the winder end of the tape measure, pulling it flat and through a dot in the middle of the throwing runway once someone has spiked a spike where the javelin ended with the 0 end of the tape. Hilary did the measuring and recording. My final experience for my Field Level 1 licence application!

Abbey Stadium, Redditch

Thursday – An early evening run with Trudie and Mary Ellen. I was still tired and it was quite warm so we decided to pop to Swanshurst Park to run round the lovely lake (where I’d run with Claire on Monday). A good idea, and we got to do some hamming (OK, I got to) when Trudie popped near the lake to take some pictures.

Photobombing in Swanshurst Park (Trudie’s photo)

3.6 miles / 12:40 mins per mile

Friday – I managed to get to yoga and enjoyed Claire’s class although got a bit confused between my left and right in a new thing we did. My yoga mat was super – it didn’t stretch or move and I didn’t slip on it. Hooray!

Saturday – I’d seen a call for officials for the West Midlands Schools track and field event at Alexander Stadium on the officials’ Facebook group and signed up and had a great day working there. Although the weather was shockingly bad, with pouring rain so bad we had to postpone some field events …

View from the officials’ room – floodlights on in the middle of the day in June!

… there was a great spirit of getting on with things and a lot of enjoyment. We were all rotaed on to do different events, so I started on discus and rotated through javelin, shot, high jump and triple jump. I was a bit alarmed to see I was lead on one high jump competition but it’s a discipline I’m used to working on and all went fine. My friend Alison, who is a senior photo finish official and has encouraged me mightily in my track and field career, was there, too, the first time we’ve worked at the same event. We failed to get a photo together but she snapped me organising the high jump!

I’m second from right in the foreground

and she gave me a wave from the officials’ room when I was working on the triple jump. We had great teachers assisting us and all went well, weather considering.

I got to fulfil two ambitions I’ve held since seeing these things done while spectating at the same stadium in June last year (see my montage of photos of officials I took then here) and …

Got to push a little trolley full of discuses round from the competition area to the Scrutinising Room (where people’s own pieces of throwing and jumping equipment are checked: all items were loaned from the stadium today)

discus trolley!

Help lift up a section of pink track from the triple jump run-up and replace it with a take-off board

It was a great day: I did all sorts of jobs from registering athletes, calling them up to compete, sounding the horn to check people in the field were safe, pulling through, measuring and spiking, recording results and working out finishing orders, so lots of good experience and learning points. And I got a lift home from a lovely co-official who lives near me (and knows Hilary and Rob / runs with KHRC sometimes: it’s a small world!).

The arty shot

Sunday – I was supposed to be running 13 miles but was quite fatigued (not just the officiating but not sleeping so well with the light mornings coming early: we are getting quotations for blinds for the bathroom and bedroom which should help with this issue). I met Trudie, Ruth and Mary Ellen at the corner of my road and we set off down to the canal and ran along the route Mary Ellen and I took the time we saw the swing bridge, towards Dickens Heath. Ruth was tired, too (OK, we were all tired!) and wanted a shorter run so Trudie ran back with her after we’d said goodbye with a nice selfie in front of a graffitied bridge …

Liz, Trudie, Ruth, Mary Ellen

We took some nice canal pics before they left us.

Canal scene, Haslucks Green

Then Mary Ellen and I continued on towards Dickens Heath. We had some idyllic scenes along the way, saw lots of baby water birds including ducks, geese (all marching down a meadow and getting purposefully into the water and coming towards us!) and a moorhen and coot, and lots of lovely gardens and decks across the water, as well as boats and dogs.

Mary Ellen and Liz

We took a selfie at our turning around point in Dickens Heath, by a bridge built in 1997, presumably when the new communities were built there – always interesting to see all this stuff and we noticed a nature reserve I might come back to explore with Matthew.

Dickens Heath bridge

Then we turned back as Mary Ellen wanted about 10 miles. This time, we managed to turn in by the arch by Yardley Wood and follow the greenways up through to the rugby club, comparing my photographed route map with Google Maps on Mary Ellen’s phone, so now we know the way properly. I was tiring by the time we got there but wanted to round things up from 9.5 so Mary Ellen went home and I did a loop … and ran into Trudie again (who had gone further than me AND gone in the shop!) and she ran me back in until we got to her road.

I was pleased that I had managed about half of the run off-road (see the path above, there was also loose gravel and small gravel and some harder path with bricks sticking up) and had worn black for hot training and my running backpack for checking it was OK, so got some good training for the ultra conditions. But I was tired and there’s no point completely flogging yourself into the ground, is there?

11.5 miles / 13:20 mins per mile

Next week I want to sleep more, do two lots of yoga and I have the Bimble Bumble 10 mile trail race on the Sunday with a few of the Sedate Ladies.

Miles this week: 18.3 Miles this year: 495.5 [I think I had this recorded wrong last week] (for 1,000 miles in the year I need 500 by the end of this month)

The Weekly Run Down is run by two wonderful running women and joined by lots of other inspirational women. Kim’s weekly wrap is here and Deborah’s is here.

You’re doing an awesome job listening to your body. Seriously, it takes time to recover from a marathon! And you want to get to your Ultra feeling good.

We were so blessed with our weather at the water stop yesterday — I did think about whether or not it would be less fun (and maybe less of us?) if the weather hadn’t been so nice — but thankfully it was.

Thank you – it’s good to have all this validation by my running colleagues!!! The canals are a relatively new thing for me and I have embraced them: I like the urban ones, too but this route is so pretty (and you can get all the way to Stratford-upon-Avon on it, which does appeal …).

Thank you! I’m getting to know a few people esp as a lot of us do both track and field and endurance. Having a neurological defect that means I don’t recognise people doesn’t help massively but most people understand (athletes are fine as they all come complete with numbers!).

I love all the scenic pics! LIke Deborah mentioned, I am also very impressed with all your volunteer work, thanks!!! It’s always wonderful to see runners giving back to our sport 😉 Thanks for joining us on the WRD!

I struggle with the early sunrise this time of year also – I am a morning person, but I still don’t want to be awake THAT early! We have blackout curtains in the bedroom, but a bit of light still gets in.

I really love how much officiating you do – it’s nice to read an account of someone you actually KNOW who does this stuff. Puts a lot into perspective! we watch these events and never even really think about the time and energy others put into making a flawless event for the athletes and spectators.

the heath looks gorgeous. i swear I’m just going to fly over one weekend so I can go running with you, Claire, Trudie and all the others 🙂

Everything is so green and lush around the canals now. Too bad the weather for the track meet did not cooperate. That’s so cool you are officiating. As the parent of a sprinter/long jumper, I often pay close attention to the way long jumps are measured.

And I can reassure you that here we had the two qualified officials doing the spiking (me) and measuring (my lead colleague) while our young and parental volunteers did pulling through the tape and raking the sand, so we concentrated ourselves on the trickiest bits!

Left and right get me all out of sorts all the time. It’ part of why I struggle with the group glasses
Baby birds!
I was sitting by the Hudson about 45m north of the city and we saw a baby sand piper and this beautiful bird making a new to us sound. It was just on eof those wonderful “rebirth” days

Not silly at all. So there are rules in the rule book as to where different age groups and levels start (these 14 yo girls started at 1 m 30 cm!!!). Then we put the bar up 5cm at a time – the support legs are marked with the height so you adjust them up and at the start and periodically we remeasure the middle of the bar to make sure it’s right. Once there’s only 3 people left you can raise it by 3 cm each time. All recorded on a lovely sheet and then the puzzle of working out who’s won! Does that help? And yes, it’s amazing to stand that near them and still not be able to see how they do it!